Control Of Blood And Lymph Cancers

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31135, 11 August 1966, Page 18

Control Of Blood And Lymph Cancers

Although X-ray treatment still offered the only cure for localised Hodgkins disease and lymph cancers, chemical controls had made great strides, allowing some improvement in health and prolonging life, said Dr. J. E. Ultmann, an assistant professor in the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, New York, in Christchurch yesterday.

Dr. Ultmann has spent almost the whole of his medical career in the college as a student, teacher, and research worker on blood and lymph cancer and the treatment and care of these patients. Soon after the Second World War nitrogen mustards were usefully employed to control both, where X-rays failed to cure, said Dr. Ultmann. Then a Canadian group produced vinca drugs, derived from the periwinkle, which helped where there was no response from X-rays or mustards. The mustards acted by alkylation whereas the vincas worked through the mechanism of protein synthesis. Now Swiss and French workers had produced methylhydrazine which acted differently again. Dr. Ultmann said that these treatments, used in sequence, helped a lot. Patients were given a “performance status” and unless there were definite regression of disease in the glands, liver, and spleen and gains in health and performance, progress was not counted.

Dr. Ultmann said he cared for 200 to 300 patients a year “with just these two diseases —blood and lymph cancers.” However, in living longer, these patients had developed new problems. Their defence mechanisms against more common diseases seemed to be impaired. They caught pneumonia and other complaints. To find out how and why, Dr. Ultmann and his team have begun by examining their own blood. They have found it can be transformed by exposure to an extract from the common kidney bean. They have found this stimulation causes lymphocytes (about 20 per cent of white corpuscles) to enlarge and tend to divide. With Hodgkins disease this reaction does not occur in stimulated blood.

The team is investigating how and why the lymphocytes differ. Dr. Ultmann is in New Zealand to attend a symposium in Dunedin next week on geographic haematology (blood differences between regions) before going to the Ninth International Haematology Congress in Sydney later in the month. Dr. Ultmann is a nephew of Mr G. E. Roth, director of the National Radiation Laboratory in Christchurch. He was evacuated from Vienna to the United States, entered the American Army from high school, moved with it up through Italy and arrived back in Austria six years after he had left. He did not begin medical studies until after the war.